How Much Will It Cost to Address Climate Change? Pennies Compared to the Alternative

Economic growth and global warming, Figure 1 from a paper studying "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production" (link below). "Non-linear" in this case means "at what warming point do economies tend to 'fall off a cliff'"? It's not the same point for all economies, but the non-linearity is obvious. (For conversion in charts a, b, and c, 20°C = 68°F, and 30°C = 86°F. Click to enlarge.)

by Thomas Neuburger

The cost of addressing climate change is much in the news these days, thanks to the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal (GND) proposal. Everyone seems to want to know how much it will cost. Too much, according to the editors at Forbes. "The Green New Deal Would Cost a Lot of Green," they warn us, and the editors at Bloomberg want us to know that "The Green New Deal Is Unaffordable."

These headlines tell you they measure cost in terms of lost profit, not lost wages, since no one at Forbes or Bloomberg wants to see wages rise. Nor do they consider lost lives.

Green New Deal advocates assure us that indeed we can pay for it, partly because of increased productivity (it will put a lot of people to work, FDR-style) and partly because the economy can simply absorb the influx of new money without the need for high "pay for it" taxes, just as the economy is absorbing the multi-trillion cost of the Iraq War and President Trump's tax cuts. When elites and the wealth they serve want something expensive, they get it, and no one bothers to make them "pay for it" later. 

See this Huffington Post article, "We Can Pay For A Green New Deal," by Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal and Greg Carlock for the gist of the "yes, it's affordable" argument.

Both statements are true, of course. Any attempt to really mitigate climate change — make the damage less, as opposed to merely adapting to the crisis — will cost "a lot of green." And yes, the economy can absorb the additional spending, allowing taxes to be used only as an economic cooling device (if and as needed), not as a prohibitory "pay for it" device.

Measuring the Wrong Variable

But few are focusing on the real measurable — not what it will cost economically to address the problem, but what it will cost economically to not address the problem. "Cost economically" here means exactly and only what the people at Forbes and Bloomberg think it means — How does economic activity slow when atmospheric temperature rises? How are profits and wealth affected? This analysis looks at no other factors affecting the economy, such as the cost of recovery from super-storms.

One of those who did address the economic cost of not dealing with climate change is Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and coauthor of a little-noticed 2015 paper, "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production." A link to the Nature abstract is here; a link to the paper itself is here (pdf).

The abstract begins this way (notes are linked in the original):

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies (1,2), but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear [jerky or stepwise] responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries (3,4). In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries [aggregate economic activity of whole nations] is reported not to respond to temperature (5), while poor countries respond only linearly (5,6). Resolving this conflict between micro [i.e. labor] and macro [nationwide] observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems (7,8) and to anticipating the global impact of climate change (9,10).

The language of the abstract is a little confusing for a lay reader, so let me explain. In essence, the question they're studying is this: Are macroeconomies (economies of whole nations) affected by atmospheric warming, contrary to what is reported? If so, are those effects linear (gradual and along a straight line) or non-linear (sudden and precipitous at certain thresholds)?

In other words, do national economies "drop off a cliff" at certain levels of increased atmospheric heating? The graph at the top, taken from the paper, shows the answer is yes.

The authors conclude (my emphasis):

We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C [56°F] and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries.

Note that this is a study of the past, not the future. In other words, the study looked at real-world consequences of warming that has already occurred, not projected consequences using economic models only. Thus this forward-looking conclusion: "If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change."

Widening global wealth inequality means that some nations will do better than others — at first. An article covering a subsequent talk by Dr. Hsiang put it this way:

That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.

A graph printed with the article indicates the eastern seaboard of the United States and northern Europe, among other places, will have improved economies (click through to see it).

But the conclusion that the East Coast and northern Europe will thrive economically is deceptive, since the study was limited to the economic effects of warming. What about the physical effects? For example, the population of the East Coast of the U.S. will at some point suffer numerous super-storms, sea level rise and the shoreline erosion that always accompanies it.

Put simply, at some point cities on both coasts will have to be moved inland as the land they sit on erodes into the ocean. How far inland? I wouldn't want to be the planner that has to figure that out, since you only want to have to do it once.

The East Coast is home to about 120 million people. The total U.S. population is between 300–350 million people. More than a third of all U.S. citizens will be forced to relocate away from the Atlantic shore. What's the cost of that?

As to northern Europe, if the thermohaline current (the Gulf Stream) is drastically altered by fresh water melt from Greenland, northern Europe — England, for example — will freeze like Canada in the winter, whose latitude it shares. Will England thrive economically in that scenario?

How Much Will It Cost Not to Mitigate Climate Change? $17 Trillion Per Year in Economic Loss Alone

So what's the economic cost of not responding to global warming? According to the paper, the bottom line is this. Global GDP (called Global World Product, or GWP) was estimated between $70 and $80 trillion about five years ago. Thus, by this paper's (highly conservative) estimates, the economic loss that results from willfully ignoring climate change will be roughly $17 trillion per year by 2100, a sum that doesn't include the additional cost of wars, famines, droughts, plagues, epidemics, and "national emergencies" of various flavors and stripes.

Can we afford, economically, not to address climate change now? The answer, of course, is no.

Yet once more the pathological among us have us asking the wrong questions. All they want to know is, will their own wealth be affected? Will they still keep their billions? Will they die poorer than they are today?

The question we should be asking is, will the rest of us die poorer — and sooner — if our first priority is protecting the wealth of the wealthy?

The answer, of course, is yes.
 

Psst, buddy, wanna buy a used war cheap? (OK, maybe not so cheap)

If you don't like these numbers, I say make up your own. As long as you understand what it means: that we have to cut back on Medicare and Social Security benefits.

by Ken

I don't know about you, but every now and then I wonder idly, Jes' how dang much is them wars in Eye-raq and 'Gannystan a-goin' ta cost us?

I especially wonder when we hear reports about those hearty congressional dinosaurs the buy-partisans sending out smoke signals that they're jes' this close to reaching agreement on a "compromise" that will finally give the Pete Peterson deficit-hawk partisans and their 1% cronies the breakthrough they've been seeking for years, using the current budget mess as a secret weapon to begin butting the "three E's" -- Medicaid, Medicare, and ultimately Social Security. It'll be Happy Days for the rich, the superrich, and their hangers-on, and a diet of austerity for everyone else.

Because, you see, those wicked "entitlements" are bankrupting us. So say the austerity fans. It's not true, of course, but if you try to say that publicly, then -- as Paul Krugman points out frequently -- you mark yourself immediately as "not serious" about economics, or government, or something. To be counted among the "serious," you have to take the Austerity Pledge. Meaning you have to be an economic illiterate on the order of Rep. Paul "Ayn Made Me Do It" Ryan or media whore Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson.

So, like I say, at times like this, I get even more curious about the total cost of our fun 'n' games in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, just for laffs, courtesy of Nation of Change, here are some folks who have some numbers. I don't know how accurate their numbers are, but I trust them a lot more than I trust the phony-baloney numbers from the austerityites and their mouthpieces like "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson.

Iraq, Afghanistan Wars Will Cost U.S. 4-6 Trillion Dollars

Published: Sunday 31 March 2013

By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service / News Analysis

Costs to U.S. taxpayers of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will run between four and six trillion dollars, making them the most expensive conflicts in U.S. history, according to a new report by a prominent Harvard University researcher.

While Washington has already spent close to two trillion dollars in direct costs related to its military campaigns in the two countries, that total "represents only a fraction of the total war costs", according to the report by former Bill Clinton administration official Linda Bilmes.

"The single largest accrued liability of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the cost of providing medical care and disability benefits to war veterans," she wrote in the 21-page report, ‘The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets’.

Bilmes, who since 2008 has co-authored a number of analyses on war costs with the World Bank’s former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, noted that more than half of the more than 1.5 million troops who have been discharged from active duty since 9/11 have received medical treatment at veterans’ hospitals and have been granted benefits for the rest of their lives. More than 253,000 troops have suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Additional costs include the replacement and repair of equipment — which wears out at an estimated six times the peace-time rate — and the accumulation of interest on money borrowed by the Treasury to finance the wars since the nearly two trillion dollars in war costs were not subject to the normal budgetary process.

So far, Washington has paid some 260 billion dollars in interest charged on war-related borrowing, but the "potential interest cost of the U.S. war debt reaches into the trillions," according to the report.

"One of the most significant challenges to future U.S. national security policy will not originate from any external threat," she wrote. "Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The report comes at a key moment, as Republicans in Congress appear increasingly split between defense hawks on the one hand, who want to maintain or increase Pentagon spending and have been pushing for a more aggressive U.S. role in the Syrian civil war, among other hotspots, and deficit hawks, on the other, who believe the country can ill afford bigger military budgets, let alone new foreign military adventures, especially in the Middle East.

The defense hawks, consisting primarily of neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists who led the march to war in Iraq 10 years ago, are particularly worried about the impact on the military of the so-called "sequester", which requires across-the-board cuts by the Pentagon totaling 500 million dollars over 10 years, in order to help reduce the deficit.

With tensions with Iran, North Korea and even China on the rise, they argue that Washington cannot afford to be seen as constrained militarily by its fiscal challenges.

But this report -- as well as another put out by Brown University on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion that estimated the total war costs at three trillion dollars -- are likely to bolster the deficit hawks among Republicans, as well as foreign-policy realists most closely identified with the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and most Democrats, including President Barack Obama and his closest aides.

That most war-related costs are actually incurred after the wars are themselves concluded is not unusual in U.S. history, according to a recent investigation by the Associated Press (AP).

After researching federal records, it reported last week that compensation for World War II veterans and their families only reached a high in 1991 -- 46 years after the war ended.
It also reported that, almost exactly 40 years after the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam, the government is still paying veterans and their families or survivors more than 22 billion dollars a year in war-related claims, and that that figure is on the rise, as the beneficiary population ages. Similarly, payments to Gulf War veterans are also increasing.

The much-greater costs to be incurred by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are explained by, among other factors, much higher survival rates among wounded soldiers, more generous benefits for veterans, new categories of beneficiaries, more expensive medical treatments, and increases in both pay and benefits for troops in order to gain more recruits for the all-volunteer army.

The report argued that dramatic increase in war-related costs means taxpayers will not get the kind of "peace dividend" that they received after other wars, including the two world wars and the Cold War after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Today as the country considers how to improve its balance sheet, it could have been hoped that the end of the wars would provide a peace dividend, such as the one during the Clinton administration that helped Americans to invest more in butter and less in guns, it concluded.

"In short, there will be no peace dividend, and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades."

The Pentagon and other national-security agencies, according to the report, will likely face more -- rather than less -- pressure to cut costs.

"One likely result," it predicted, "is that budgetary constraints will tilt the U.S. in a direction of fewer military personnel in the forces, …and greater investment in unmanned weaponry, robotics, and other technological solutions -- which may or may not be a wise choice over the longer-term."

To Miriam Pemberton, a national-security analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, the new study should prompt a major re-assessment of the regular military budget (not including the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), which grew by nearly 50 percent in real terms to more than half a trillion dollars -- over the decade that followed 9/11.

"We need to bring that budget back to where it was when these wars began," she told IPS. "Those savings need to be re-invested in the needs that have been neglected over the past decade, foremost among them, in my view, being the urgent need to address the climate crisis by investing in a transition to a clean energy and transportation economy."

And what are the neocons who got us into Iraq worried about? The sequester! But then, these are "serious" people.

Let me just call attention to one interesting note here:

"The single largest accrued liability of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the cost of providing medical care and disability benefits to war veterans."

Which might not even be so bad if we were actually providing "proper medical care and disability benefits" to all the vets we sent out to be maimed. But of course we aren't; we're trying to finesse that obligation on the cheap.

'Cause we, y'know, support our troops. Another of the lies the right-wing war-mongers like to tell.

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Sure, $5.7B is a stiff price to pay to get out of Afganistan -- but consider the alternative

"The size of the withdrawal is mind-boggling. But with the 'fiscal cliff' approaching fast, it's worth taking a moment to realize that the costly Afghan operation is going on a credit card, along with the $1 trillion or more spent in Iraq."

-- Washington Post "Fine Print" columnist Walter Pincus,
in "The high cost of disengagement"

by Ken

Just two or three weeks ago I wrote ("Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars") about this astonishing break with previous American practice, by which the Bush regime broke with all precedent by "paying" for its pernicious adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan by running a tab -- a practice candidate Barack Obama roundly deplored but once in office was either unable or unwilling to change.

It has never been easy to pay for wars, but until now successive U.S. governments took it that there was no way around it. Of course there still isn't. Eventually the bills have to be paid. But when you use the sleight of hand of essentially putting it all on credit cards, you may be able to avoid embarrassing public discussion of the size and monstrousness of these expenditures.

Now Walter Pincus, following the mandate of his "Fine Print" column, has taken a close look at a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that says "it's going to cost an additional $5.7 billion over the next year or two just to transfer or return most of the troops and equipment we shipped into that country." That's on top of the "nearly $600 billion [spent] over the past 10 years putting combat forces into Afganistan."

"The size of the withdrawal is mind-boggling," says Walter. "But with the 'fiscal cliff' approaching fast, it's worth taking a moment to realize that the costly Afghan operation is going on a credit card, along with the $1 trillion or more spent in Iraq." And he reminds us: "Iraq and Afghanistan are the first U.S. wars in which the American public was not asked to pay a cent in additional taxes."

For those who are curious, Walter provides a detailed sketch of how this withdrawal budget breaks down, and also explains some basic facts of life that explain why Afghanistan-withdrawal costs will be substantially higher even than Iraq-withdrawal costs were. Considering how difficult (and how expensive) it has been to get personnel and equipment into land-locked and barely accessible Afghanistan, it will be at least as difficult (and as expensive) to get them out -- unlike Iraq, where we had easy road access to safe seaports for relatively easy and cheap maritime transport. In both cases, however, even the sky-high costs of withdrawal were only possible thanks to long, detailed planning.

The Iraq drawdown showed the importance of early planning. Withdrawal plans began in 2008, three years before the December 2011 final departure of U.S. combat troops. In Afghanistan, the Marine Corps and Navy began withdrawal preparations in 2009, the Army in 2010.

An obvious question, I suppose, is whether we should be put off by the drawdown price tag. And the answer, it seems to me, is of course not! Does it make more sense to continue pouring those staggering piles of cash (or charge slips) down those ratholes?

At some point we really do have to have to face up to the implications (I'm restraining myself from using the word consequences) of disastrous policy choices. Otherwise we have an adjunct to the concept of "too big to fail": too expensive to pull the plug on.

The militarists -- and, come to think of it, advocates of generally doody-brained right-wing boondoggles -- like to play this as an "aha!" card. It was extraordinary enough that the subject of cuts in military expenditures even came up at the time they were written into the now-infamous sequester (and they probably wouldn't have found their way in if anyone believed at the time that the sequester might actually happen) and right-wing ideologues suddenly warn of the economic consequences: Jobs will be lost!

Of course when it comes to making other kinds of spending cuts, cuts of programs that actual provide useful human services, the Righties never worry about that. Screw all those effing public-service workers! And never mind if our cities -- and our rural precincts too -- go to hell! It's wasteful government spending. But then, as we know, when it comes to truly wasteful government spending, notably the sacred boondoggles of "national security" profligacy, even the hardest of die-hard "fiscal conservatives" become blooming Keynesians. It's the phenomenon of "military Keynesianism." Perhaps "economic stimulus" becomes real to them -because so many of them are pocketing sizable chunks of the megabucks poured down those drains?

And did you notice how our beloved munitions industry, faced with sudden talk about even the possibility of tightening gun restrictions, started threatening to pull the plug on the economy of Connecticut, and by extension any other state that has sold its soul to the Devil of the armaments industry? As the old saying goes, lie down with dogs and you'll wake up with fleas.

We don't like to talk about it much, but one of the few things we still produce for which there's a robust world market is arms. How much suffering and death around the world takes place to satiate the greed of the arms merchants? The obvious consequence is that it's unlikely that there's any country less enthusiastic about arms reduction than ours -- with this lovely new wrinkle that we better shut up about it if we know what's good for us. Otherwise the arms makers will make us sorry.

Walter Pincus ends his new piece: "[I]t's worth paying attention to the monetary and human costs of getting into and out of military ventures so that perhaps the country will be better prepared next time." Which seems to me a serious understatement. A pair of pointless and doomed, indeed pernicious, military involvements of staggering dimenson were undertaken with essentially no concern for the cost. Of course if they had been evaluated simply in terms of desirability and feasibility of goals they would never have been undertaken in the first place. As our colleague Ian Welsh points out, "In policy terms, the kind thing to do is usually the right thing to do."

I know that this kind of thinking is regarded as "naive," as "pie in the sky." But if Ian's thinking had been applied seriously to the decisions to embrace the Iraq and Afghanistan boondoggles, having as their result not improving but compromising our national security, creating new, more determined and long-lived enemies, might we not have thought better? If any consideration had been given to the consequences of turning over such a large segment of our economy to the Merchants of Death, might we not have arrived at different thoughts about the kinds of subsidies we wished to apply, or not?

I sincerely hope that Walter is right, that if Americans scrutinize the costs of extricating ourselves from these holes we dig ourselves, we'll think better about it the next time the subject comes up. But I think that lesson might be learned better if we were getting occasional reports from the cells where "Big Dick" Cheney, "Chimpy the Prez" Bush, and Donnie Rumsfeld are serving their life-without-possibility-of-parole sentences.

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Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars

The unholy troika -- Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney: No, if they were on Death Row where they belong, that wouldn't solve the debt problem they did so much to create. But what if they and all their war-profiteering friends, relations, and cronies were to voluntarily make restitution for all their ill-gotten gains derived from the troika's crimes?

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented the first time that a U.S. president did not seek new taxes to cover the fighting. Supported by a GOP-led House and Senate from 2001 through 2006, and then just the GOP-run House, Bush raised the debt ceiling seven times through 2008, almost doubling it, from about $6 trillion to $11.3 trillion."

-- Walter Pincus, in a WaPo "Fine Print" column,
"Debt and deficit lessons from 1917"

by Ken

For a couple of days now I've been trying to figure out how to write about Dexter Filkins's timely piece in the new (Dec. 17) New Yorker, "General Principles: How good was David Petraeus?." It's a question that's been on my mind for a while, and I can't think of any one better equipped to tackle it than frequent war-zone correspondent Filkins. (Tip: For once, a piece I want to talk about is actually available on newyorker.com. Why not just read it yourself?)

One of the things that has gotten in the way of writing about the Petraeus piece is that Filkins lands us in so many crucial "side" issues, like for example the mind-bogglingly stupidiity and savagery and grinding, all-encompassing incompetence of the mighty triumvirate of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld that got us into the Iraq quagmire -- measures of stupidity, savagery, and incompetence that haven't even begun to be reckoned with. If the had, the three of them would by now be sitting on Death Row, ideally in a special Gunatánamo version featuring the kind of humane treatment they cooked up for the hordes of indiscriminately arrested nobodies rounded up on their watch for no good reason whatsoever. In this special Death Row I'm imagining, the architects of this ideological psychosis would be specially not-tortured, in just the way that they assured us we don't torture prisoners. In fact, I would like to see them not-tortured for at least several hours a day, until they signed affidavits apologizing for having been born and turning over all their assets, and the assets of anyone else which trace back to their stewardship, to begin repaying the massive bill that finally came due once they were safely the hell out of office.

Drawing on Thomas Ricks's The Generals, Filkins paints a vivid picture of the imbecility and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika's planning for ward and the incompetence of the military forces the Big Three threw at Iraq. And unfortunately the answer to the question of how good General Petraeus really was turns out to be that on the whole in Iraq he was good enough to largely get Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld off the hook for the true monstrousness of their actual record, which should make them amont the most hated figures ever to hold public office in this country.

Talk about irony! It's thanks to Petraeus that it's possible for right-wingers to pretend that the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq was actually vindicated by subsequent events. But of course it's highly unlikely in any event that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have paid any price, let alone the price they deserved to pay, for what they did in Iraq, because the judging is done by right-wingers who have officially abandoned any connection to any standard of truth. I mean, these people really believe that their mendacious and delusional fun-house-mirror version of reality has official standing, and that they have a God-given right to lie at all times, large and small, without any limit whatsoever.

I always feel that I'm mostly talking to myself when I repeat the (to me) obvious reality that today every word out of the mouth out of every right-winger is a lie. However, I got a genuine lift the other day from Dan Froomkin's HuffPost report the other day, "How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign," based on conversations with that indomitable conservative-but-sane DC duo of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein --

[A]ccording to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

"The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth," said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

"I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it -- and with their editors," said Mann. "But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance."

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top." . . .

(The "publicly concluded" link, by the way, is to an op-ed piece that Mann and Ornstein penned for the Washington Post last April, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem.")

Really, the way the current "negotiations" over the fiscal-cliff situation should go is this: Democrats, who admittedly have far from clean hands in these matters, should nevertheless point out at every "negotiating" session: "Every word out of your mouths is a lie. Either stop lying or blow your brains out and see if it's possible to have you replaced by people who at least know what truth is." And then they should appear in front of the TV cameras and say: "Regrettably no progress was made today because every word out of the mouths of every Republican is a lie, and there are apparently no Republicans who are not pathological liars. This is a problem."


MEANWHILE, WALTER PINCUS POINTS OUT THE
FINANCIAL CHICANERY OF THE BUSH REGIMISTAS

Again, it's really a shame that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld aren't in their tiny Death Row torture chambers cells to read today's WaPo piece by "Fine Print" columnist Walter Pincus, "Debt and deficit lessons from 1917," which points to one of the crucial ways the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika was able to get away with its Iraq and Afghanistan penis-lengthening exercises: the fact that so much of it could be done without paying for it. Of course the consequence was that at the same time that they were working so hard to crash the economy in other ways, they saw to it that these largely uncounted billions of dollars were hemorrhaging without general public attention. This is one of the crucial reasons why we have so much debt, but the very same oligarchs who watched silently while it was rung up now have the unmitigated gall to tell us that our irreducible economic problem is those dreadful "entitlements" that the takers-not-makers are soaking supposedly up.

(I didn't say that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should be the only ones in our new Guantánamo Death Row.)

Pincus invites us to go back in time.

As some Republicans again threaten to use the debt limit statute next year to leverage protection of tax rates for the wealthy, it's worth going back 95 years to see how Americans viewed taxes and spending when that law passed.

The statute was born out of the need to pay for government spending from our entrance into World War I. George W. Bush's White House didn’t consider such an issue when it launched its war on terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks or undertook the more costly invasion of Iraq in 2003.

America in 1917 did not fight on a credit card. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, with Congress's support, raised taxes and sold Liberty Bonds to cover costs. Bush, by contrast, had just lowered taxes and underestimated the costs of his military efforts. Borrowing to pay for the war helped lead to the current fiscal crisis.

Pincus takes us back through the political battles of 1917, to the U.S. declaration of war agains Germany on Apr. 6, 1917, after which President Wilson "quickly sought help from Congress to raise the war funds.

Sen. Furnifold Simmons (D-N.C.) argued, "It has been the custom of this country to pay war bills by bond issues, and I see no reason for a change in that policy."

Financier J.P. Morgan said up to 20 percent should come from taxes. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo thought raising taxes for half was best, while some members of Congress said taxes the first year should provide 75 percent of war costs.

Within 18 days, we learn, "Congress unanimously passed the largest bond bill in U.S. history," authorizing the sale of $5.5 billion. In May $2 billion worth were put on sale, and "5 million people offered to buy $3 billion worth."

In another five months Congress passed the War Revenue Act, "which was designed to raise $2.5 billion annually.

As the Treasury Department noted in a report, "This amount was believed by Congress to be as large as could be levied reasonably and fairly at this time. Every effort was made to distribute the burden of taxation where it could most easily be borne without hardship to the individual or injury to the productive power of the nation."

More than $1 billion was to come from an excess-profits tax on corporations, individuals and partnerships whose profits "have been increased enormously by war business, or business incident to the war," Treasury said.

Rates were also raised on corporations and the wealthy, personal exemptions for married and single taxpayers were reduced slightly and excise taxes were raised on liquor and tobacco products. Everyone paid something to support the war.

Did you get that? "

* Every effort was made to distribute the burden of taxation where it could most easily be borne."

* There was to be "an excess-profits tax on corporations, individuals and partnerships whose profits 'have been increased enormously by war business, or business incident to the war.'"

* "Rates were also raised on corporations and the wealthy, personal exemptions for married and single taxpayers were reduced slightly and excise taxes were raised on liquor and tobacco products. Everyone paid something to support the war."
The debt limit came into being later in 1917, as Congress was authorizing the second sale of Liberty Bonds, as part of a way of "giv[ing] Treasury a better way to manage raising funds."

The limit was set above the debt so the government was free to raise funds when needed. For example, in 1919 the debt limit was set at $43 billion when the debt was $25.5 billion.

Pincus then takes us through the intertwined history of the raising of the debt limit and the need to pay for, first, World War II, then Vietnam (not Korea -- "that conflict was mostly financed by increased taxes"), and even the first Iraq war, which the first President Bush paid for with a combination of spending cuts and, violating his sacred "no new taxes" oath," tax increases.

Then came Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Already wars of choice had been massively facilitated by the elmination of the draft. The troika knew they wouldn't be caught drafting America's youth wholesale into their crack-brained foreign adventures. And another crucial lesson learned from Vietnam: Americans wouldn't be watching their children flown home in body bags. Bad for morale, that.

There still remained the matter of paying for the Bush regime's planned orgy of bully-boy bravado. For one thing, we know, the clever idea arose of keeping as much as possible of the actual expenditures out of, or invisible in, the budget. But of course the bills still had to be managed somehow.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented the first time that a U.S. president did not seek new taxes to cover the fighting. Supported by a GOP-led House and Senate from 2001 through 2006, and then just the GOP-run House, Bush raised the debt ceiling seven times through 2008, almost doubling it, from about $6 trillion to $11.3 trillion.

President Obama followed suit. In November 2009, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) and others introduced a bill for a surtax to help pay for the war. They had no support from leaders of either party or Obama.

The fiscal cliff is just weeks away, and the debt limit will come up probably next month.

I know Obama talked a lot about at least getting Iraq and Afghanistan expenditures into the legit federal budget, so we would at least know where the money is going. How much of that he did, I don't know. And while he hasn't broken the Bush regime dependency on raising the debt limit, the financial catastrophe he inherited hasn't given him much financing flexibility, short of drastically reducing the outflow of U.S. expenditures on those wars, not to mention DoD preparations for even more wasteful wars to come. All of this would have taken either more political courage or more political will than this president has.

Walter Pincus has one remaining question.

The fiscal cliff is just weeks away, and the debt limit will come up probably next month.

Where are leaders like those in 1917? Where are the American people who willingly shared new tax burdens, at least to pay for their forces fighting overseas?

By which I don't think he means people who do no more than mindless shout, "Support the troops."

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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. the antiwar activist

"I agree with Dante that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

--the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., introducing this seminal
sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 30, 1967

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

-- Dr. King, in his speech "A Time to Break Silence,"
at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967

by Ken

We began Martin Luther King Day remembering MLK's tireless crusade to make a reality of the Declaration of Independence's insistence that it's a "self-evident truth" that "all men are created equal." Certainly this earned him more enemies of a die-hard hatred and dangerousness -- including, of course, our very own FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover -- than any one person should have to contend with.

As we end this day of remembrance, we mustn't forget that Dr. King's vision of social justice required him to take a stand that was enormously controversial even among his supporters: resolute opposition to the Vietnam war, which he understood guaranteed that money would not be available to undertake making the promise of real equal opportunity an actuality.

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has made the same link between our misbegotten military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which not only aren't enhancing but are undermining our national security and at the same time draining funds from the economy which are desperately needed for crucial elements of the progressive agenda. This week, honoring Dr. King, PDA is launching a venture called Brown Bag Lunch Vigils (BBLVs), an outgrowth of its "Healthcare NOT Warfare" campaign, to raise awareness among the public and our elected officials that the electorate is not being served by current U.S. policies."

The Brown Bag Lunch Vigils are designed to encourage like-minded Americans to engage with their congressmembers:

IN MEMORY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, VIGILS AGAINST WAR FUNDING TO BE HELD AT CONGRESSIONAL OFFICES NATIONWIDE

As the country celebrates the life of Martin Luther King on January 18, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) will launch the Brown Bag Lunch Vigils to be held every third Wednesday each month. The vigils are an expansion of their Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign "to raise awareness among the public and our elected officials that the electorate is not being served by current U.S. policies."

With the White House having just announced its intention of requesting another record military budget ($708 billion, not including military budgets in the Departments of State and Energy or the CIA) and another war supplemental ($33 billion), it is appropriate that the first lunchtime vigils will take place immediately following Martin Luther King Day.

Colorful vigils and pickets are already planned in many congressional districts, including the following, with others being added: AZ-3, AZ-5, CA-6, CA-22, CA-23, CA-48, FL-10, FL-17, MA-2, MI-9, OH-13, OH-17, PA-7, WA-2, WA-6, WI-3, WI-7. More details are available about each location online: http://tinyurl.com/brownbagvigil

PDA, a political action committee formed in 2004, is asking members of the House to publicly commit to voting “No” on any bills that fund wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen, and to publicly urge their colleagues and the House leadership to make the same commitment. As lesser steps in the same direction, PDA is encouraging congress members to cosponsor HR 2454, calling for an exit strategy from Afghanistan, and HR 3699, prohibiting any increase in the number of U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

PDA is encouraging consideration of the financial trade-offs necessary for wars. "We can pay for warfare but not healthcare," said PDA's national director Tim Carpenter, "for bombs but not books, for weapons but not windmills, for hellfire but not homes. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq labor on, with no end in sight, it's become alarmingly clear that they have exacted a staggering human and financial toll on the Iraqi, Afghan, and American people. Many of our representatives claim to oppose continuing down this path. We want them to work to block the funding."

The BBLV campaign --

is calling on [PDA] members, and like-minded individuals and organizations, to gather on the third Wednesday of every month in front of -- and in -- congressional offices in districts across the country. We’re asking you to spend your lunch hour exercising your First Amendment Rights by holding vigils, rallies, meetings with aides and representatives, pickets, and demonstrations that will serve to educate our elected officials, the public, and the press about the human and financial costs of war and militarism.

Specifically, PDA and our allies call on President Obama and Congress to support HR 2404, calling for an exit strategy from Afghanistan; HR 3699, prohibiting any increase in the number of U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan, and to establish improved and expanded Medicare for All to residents of the United States. We cannot let them forget that we are watching and waiting for the next election.

On the linked webpage you'll find detailed instructions for how to get involved, how to create a BBLV event, contact info, and more.

[click to enlarge]

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Reason no. 1827 why it's a bad idea to go to war behind leaders whose first interest is compensating for their tiny penises

Iraqi interpreter Ali Kanaan suffered hearing loss and burns to more than a third of this body as a result of a 2006 bombing while he was working as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He says he was pressured into taking an insurance settlement he did not think was adequate. [L.A. Times caption]

by Ken

It's hard to believe that stupidity and deceit practiced at this level don't rise to the level of a crime.

I know we've said it, and said it, and said it. But we are paying a horrendous price for pretending that it's okay to allow the crimes and malfeasances of the Bush regime go unaccounted for. President Obama's nice-sounding rhetoric about wanting "to look ahead" is, I"m sorry to have to say, nonsense. Allowing past blunders to go unexamined -- and, yes, unpunished where that applies -- all but guarantees that those same blunders will be repeated, and compounded.

The indications are that not only are we going to continue paying, but the price is going to continue going up. I think most Americans still have little idea the extent to which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were planned by ideologically blinded dimwits, liars, and wholly unaccountable thugs.

I think people have some idea that there were some crossed wires in the planning for the Iraq war. If you read the first couple of Bob Woodward "privileged insider" in (a politer way of saying designated propagandist for) the Bush regime, you can see then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld terrorizing his nonpolitical subordinates in the Pentagon (the political people, of course, understood that they were involved in planning a political, not a military, undertaking) to produce a war plan that matched what Chimpy the Prez and especially "Big Dick" Cheney were insisting on: something lean and quick involving a bare minimum of troops -- especially relative to what seasoned military commanders thought necessary.

Of course their "war on the cheap" came close to bankrupting us, or maybe did bankrupt us, because nobody involved in the process of planning the invasion seems to have felt responsible for figuring out how to pay for it. Possibly they believed some of the rhetoric we heard about Iraqi oil revenues paying for the whole fine adventure. Ha ha! Or maybe they just understood all they had to do was keep the expense out of the regular budget, and Congress could be counted on to keep passing "supplemental" appropriations, and never mind how those would be paid for.

This was all quite monstrous, but the real monstrosity was the failure to think through the real-world contingencies, starting with the question that you or I would probably have thought the second most basic, right have the question of how we would manage the invasion: What do we do afterward? The degree to which the Rumsfeld brain trust was unprepared in every way for every single thing that happened is staggering.

I'll assume that DWT are familiar with the basic outlines of that catastrophic failure, and are aware that in fact in the State Department they actualy were trying to plan for what would happen after the invasion. And we're also aware of just how far Cheney and Rumsfeld to keep the State Department entirely out of the planning and execution, sneering at those sissies' pussyfooting and thumb-sucking. The great innovation of fighting a war with mercenaries called "contractors" was all DoD, and all the ways in which that was completely out of control, literally so in the matter of policing the behavior of the contract employees -- that's all the handiwork of Rumsfled's geniuses' innovation of fighting a "secret" war. . And of course it kept costing us extra billions of dollars we didn't have.

What's new, at least to me, is the continuing unveiling of yet more ways in which the Cheney-Rumsfeld war plan ignored considerations you would have thought basic. My attention was directed to the third part of series by a team of Los Angeles Times reporters ("Injured war zone contractors fight to get care" -- following "Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting" and "Foreign workes for U.S. are casualties twice over") and the story is in almost equal measures shocking and nauseating.

It concerns the contractors, but not the glamorous ones like the Blackwell and KBR ones, and this last installment concerns interpreters in particular. Maybe it's not all that surprising that Rumsfeld's Robots never stopped to think that our forces in Iraq would need to be able to communicate with the locals, especially once the adventure switched from invasion to occupation. Americans generally have a habit of forgetting that not everybody in the world speaks American, and for some reason our defense establishment seems especially resistant to this fact of life, as witness the glee with which it has expunged most of our linguistically qualified military personnel under DADT. "It's only them gays that speak furrin languages," I can hear the generals saying.

Eventually, of course, something had to be done, and the Pentagon went the contractor route. But the contractors who are the subject of the LAT reports weren't the regime-favored soldiers of fortune who were paid enormous salaries and benefits and excused from what appears to be any kind of oversight. No, these people, and the interpreters in particular, were not well paid, were treated even worse, lied to repeatedly while they were being killed an maimed in our service, and then left pretty much to fend for themselves. We have simply walked away from our obligation to those people.

The detail is horrifying and stomach-turning, so I'll refer you to the Times for that. But for the overall picture, here's just the start of T. Christian's Miller's Part 3.

FORGOTTEN WARRIORS

Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting

For Iraqis and Afghans killed or injured while working for the U.S. military, benefits have often fallen far short of what was promised to them and their families.

By T. Christian Miller
December 18, 2009

After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: thousands of interpreters.



To fill the gap, the Pentagon turned to Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, which eventually hired more than 8,000 interpreters, most of them Iraqis.



For $12,000 a year, these civilians served as the voice of America's military, braving sniper fire and roadside bombs. Insurgents targeted them for torture and assassination. Many received military honors for their heroism.



At least 360 interpreters employed by Titan or its successor company were killed between March 2003 and March 2008, and more than 1,200 were injured. The death toll was far greater than that suffered by the armed forces of any country in the American-led coalition other than the United States. Scores of interpreters assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan also have been killed or wounded.



An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found.



Interviews, corporate documents and data on insurance claims show that:



* Insurers have delayed or denied claims for disability payments and death benefits, citing a lack of police reports or other documentary evidence that interpreters' injuries or deaths were related to their work for the military. Critics, including some U.S. Army officers, say it is absurd to expect Iraqis and Afghans to be able to document the cause of injuries suffered in a war zone.



* Iraqi interpreters taken to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment say they were pressured to accept lump-sum settlements from insurers, rather than a stream of lifetime benefits potentially worth more, and were told that if they didn't sign, they would be sent back home -- a potential death sentence for Iraqis associated with the American war effort.



* Interpreters who have immigrated to the United States as refugees have ended up penniless, on food stamps or in menial jobs because their benefits under the U.S. insurance program are based on wages and living costs in their home countries. Payments intended to provide a decent standard of living in Iraq or Afghanistan leave the recipients below the poverty level in this country.

Now Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are apparently all off the hook. It's not their problem. Somehow, even though it wouldn't directly help the victims, these disclosures would feel more palatable if Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and a bunch of their co-conspirators were languishing in dungeons. It would at least be a statement of acceptance of moral responsibility, a necessary prelude to accepting legal responsibility.

You feel bad for President Obama, with all the problems he has inherited from the Bush regimistas. But it's truly his problem now., and by now he's lost the window of opportunity for blaming it all on the Bushfolk.

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What? The adventure in Iraq (you remember Iraq?) led by our heroic & steadfast War & Peace President hasn't been an unbroken triumph?

Didn't he tell us he didn't believe in nation-building?
Well, he sure proved it!

"Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

"The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

"By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.

"The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort."

-- from "Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders"
by James Glanz and T. Christian Miller, in yesterday's NYT

by Ken

We should probably take note of this draft history of the U.S. attempt to rebuild Iraq currently circulating in Baghdad on Washington, reported on in yesterday's NYT by "James Glanz report[ing] from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, report[ing] from Washington."

One reason I'm curious is that, at least until our one-and-only president was dragged back onto the job by the impending collapse of the U.S. auto industry, all of his energies (such as they are) seemed to have been diverted to the herculean task of burnishing his "legacy" -- or, to put it less politely, inventing a fictional legacy to replace the all-too-apparent real one.

Most notably, in the burnished history of the Bush regime, that adventure in Iraq, led by our steadfast War & Peace President, has been a triumph! We set out to bring democracy to the Middle East, and by gosh, we succeeded beyond expectation! Hooray!

Apparently the still-unpublished new official history paints a different picture, and even names names. The NYT account, datelined Baghdad, begins:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag -- particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army -- the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

That the Pentagon simply made up numbers to soften the political blow -- in such matters as the readiness of Iraqi security to take over policing and fighting -- is vouchsafed by no less than former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Iraq ground-troop commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and even the viceregal Blob of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, the man who more or less ran Iraq until the Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

"Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," as the report is titled, "was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here." It is "based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Mr. Bowen's office has reported over the years."

The report makes clear that the roots of the bungling run deep, starting with the total failure of the Defense Dept. (which of course totally freezed out the State Dept., which was planning for a post-invasion Iraq) to plan in any meaningful way for any kind of rebuilding effort:

On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

"What do you think that'll cost?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

"I think it's going to cost billions of dollars," Mr. Garner said.

"My friend," Mr. Rumsfeld replied, "if you think we're going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken."

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

Mr. Garner, of course, was summarily replaced by the abovementioned viceregal clown Paul Bremer. Apparently, along with failing to consider every other aspect of the aftermath of the invasion, Secretary Rumsfeldand his DoD geniuses never took into account the devastation produced by the invasion and its aftermath.

Tables in the history show that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil, public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion.

Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years.

By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services -- with a single exception, mobile phones -- had returned to prewar levels.

Glanz and Miller end their account by looking at the way Stuart Bowen ends his:

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from "Great Expectations" by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: "We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us."

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Whose Vision-- Cusack's Or Bush's? The Privatization Of War

Pallets of cash

John Cusack's movie about a future fictitious occupation of a fictitious country, Turaqistan, is premised on the privatization of... well, pretty much everything. In the film a Cheney-like CEO of a Halliburton-like company, Tamerlane, is conducting its own foreign policy-- and war and reconstruction. This morning's NY Times features a story by James Risen on a shocking milestone in Bush's implementation of Cusack's dystopic vision: "The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003."

That's a lot of taxpayer dollars being spent-- with virtually no supervision or controls on private firms to run the war. In fact one dollar in five is going to private contractors, a great many of whom are contributors to Bush's career and to Republican Party politicians. There are now more contractors in Iraq than there are U.S. troops. And if you recall that little incident of the bridge in Fallujah in which 4 of the hated Blackwater mercenaries were burned alive, you are probably aware that many of the contractors are intensely hated by the Iraqis, who don't like being occupied by disrespectful and very violent foreigners.

The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield.

...Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.

In addition, the dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts. When the war began, for example, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney before he was vice president, became the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq. After years of criticism and scrutiny for its role in Iraq, Halliburton sold the unit, which is still the largest defense contractor in the war, and has 40,000 employees in Iraq.

“This is the first war that the United States has fought where so many of the people and resources involved aren’t of the military, but from contractors,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School and a member of an independent commission created by Congress to study contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is unprecedented,” he added. “It was considered an all-out imperative by the administration to keep troop levels low, particularly in the beginning of the war, and one way that was done was to shift money and manpower to contractors. But that has exposed the military to greater risks from contractor waste and abuse.”

Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”

Peter W. Singer, a defense contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, said the biggest problem was that the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq, almost no thought had been given to an overall strategy to determine which jobs and functions should be handled by the government, and which could be turned over to private companies without damaging the military effort.

“These new numbers point to the overall question-- when do you cross the line in terms of turning over too much of the public mission of defense to private firms,” Mr. Singer said. “There are some things that are appropriate for private companies to do, but others things that are not. But we don’t seem to have had a strategy for determining which was appropriate and which wasn’t. We have just handed over functions to contractors in a very haphazard way.”

One of my favorite scenes in Turaqistan was at the Tamerlane trade show where an executive explains how Tamerlane precision bombs had blown off the limbs of a bunch of women who were subsequently outfitted with Tamerline prosthetic limbs and taught to dance and we now part of a dance troupe helping to advertise Tamerlane products. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wants to hold hearings like the Truman Commission which looked into, among other things, war profiteering-- familiar territory for the Bush Family.

Once the Bush Regime is shut down in January there's no one we're going to need in Congress more than Alan Grayson, who's running for Congress in Orlando. Alan has been the most successful tracker and prosecutor of war profiteers in the country. He's featured in this BBC documentary. Take a look and you'll see why Blue America is so enthusiastic about him. Please watch it-- and then consider making a donation to his campaign at his Blue America ActBlue page.




UPDATE: HILLARY DEMANDS REFORM

Following release of a Congressional Budget Office report today showing the massive expenditures and an over-reliance on private contractors in Iraq under the Bush Administration and the revelation of a report by the Small Business Administration Inspector General showing Blackwater was awarded millions of dollars in federal contracts designated for small businesses, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today called on Congress to act on her legislation to reform the contracting system and put in place needed accountability measures and urged the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to launch an investigation into the impact of Blackwater's violation.

Her statement: "This administration's failure to hold contractors accountable is outrageous. More and more government responsibilities are being passed along to private companies at huge cost to American taxpayers, and at the same time, more and more reports emerge of fraud, waste and abuse in the contracting process. This pattern must be brought to an end, which is why I have introduced legislation to bring critically needed reform to the government contracting process and why I'm calling for an investigation to get to the bottom of this latest abuse of taxpayer resources."

When you look at those losers like Kaine and Bayh that the Obama campaign has floated to the media and then you compare them to Hillary... gee, you really have to wonder how he can possibly not pick her!

BUSH DEMANDS ON IRAQ REJECTED-- BY HIS OWN PUPPET REGIME!

The Bush Regime dead-enders believe they can create facts on the ground that will force the next president-- at least in their minds-- to stay in Iraq. The Bush Regime position calls for dozens of permanent bases and the kind of extraterritoriality that was banished among nations after the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. There are no Iraqi politicians who would survive for long-- and I don't mean survive politically only-- if he signed a treaty even close to what Bush is demanding. Even the craven Maliki puppet regime has said no. Maliki: “The Iraqi demands are unacceptable to the Americans, and the American demands are unacceptable to the Iraqis, and the result is that we have reached an impasse. The Iraqis will not consent to an agreement that infringes their sovereignty.”

Today NY Times reports that negotiations have come to a standstill. Bush has backed down on granting immunity to the contractors and detested mercenaries with which he has flooded the country. The Times seems to indicate that Bush is dreaming in regard to this provision. "The change is sure to prove controversial, because security contractors will be reluctant to continue to work in Iraq’s dangerous environment if they can be prosecuted in Iraqi courts." American soldiers would still have immunity from Iraqi laws no matter what they do, something that isn't sitting well with any Iraqis in light of recent events.

The agreement is designed to provide a legal basis for American security operations in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year. The Americans have been seeking to assure that their troops have the power to conduct operations and detain suspects without the approval of the Iraqi government and to act without fear of prosecution in the Iraqi justice system. They are also seeking the authority to establish more than 50 long-term bases.

The Times seems to have neglected to mention anything about U.S. demands for control over Iraq's oil-- and at a time when imperialistic U.S. politicians from both political parties are demanding that the U.S. seize the occupied country's oil to pay the cost of American operations there. That's considered a war crime.

Although Obama isn't commenting on the negotiations-- after all this isn't a game or a publicity stunt-- McCain took the opportunity to rush to the microphones and remind everyone that he-- along with the only two members of the Senate who can stand him, Lindsey Graham and Holy Joe Lieberman-- is the embodiment of between 4 and 100 more years of Bush's failed and disastrous Iraq policies.

Michael Ware's report on CNN yesterday was instructive:

WE REALLY DON'T NEED TO BE EATEN ALIVE BY PREDATORS

On Thursday the Senate voted to continue funding Bush's occupation of Iraq by an overwhelming majority. There are parts of it Bush doesn't like but the majority is veto-proof. Is that good? Usually when we hear veto-proof, we wag our tails. "Veto-proof" means a thumb in the eye for Bush. Is a quick trial, a final cigarette and a blindfold next? But in this case we're talking about $200 billion mostly to keep his failed Iraq policies moving forward in place. The Senate tried making it more palatable-- and this is the part Bush doesn't like-- by larding it up with lots of domestic pork and by a passing popular amendment to provide benefits for veterans. (They also defeated legislation calling for an end to the occupation.) The Army Times had a clear-eyed look at it on Friday:

[T]he price tag of war and domestic funding portions of the bill top $200 billion, setting up a showdown with President Bush, who has said he will veto any supplemental that features enough domestic spending to drive the overall cost of the measure above his $180 billion request.

“There is a time and place where domestic funding should be debated and considered on its merits, but that is not in a bill focused on the emergency needs of our troops,” the administration said in a May 15 policy statement on the war-funding bill.

Republicans began breaking with the president on inserting domestic spending into the measure May 15 during a Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the panel’s version of the bill, which proposes money for energy assistance for low-income households, a 13-week extension of unemployment insurance, prisons, more money for the Food and Drug Administration and other domestic items. That trend continued as many Republicans helped Democrats approve the domestic funding portion of the bill, 75-22.

But some Republicans objected, charging a war spending bill was the wrong legislative vehicle for pushing through spending for important domestic projects and a major overhaul of the GI Bill.

...Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned Congress that money in some key accounts, including Army personnel and operations funds, will run out by mid-June.

Gates said the Pentagon could move money between accounts in what he called a “shell game” to prevent severe disruption, but only until some time in July.

Gates on Tuesday said the Army’s military personnel account will run dry June 15 and the Army’s operations and maintenance fund will do the same around July 5.

The Army’s payroll problems can be solved temporarily by shifting money from the personnel accounts of the Navy and Air Force, but there is no easy resolution because all of the services are short in the same budget account.

It seems to be that the neither the Pentagon nor any other arm of the Regime-- can be trusted (not even a little) to "move money between accounts" or play any "shell games." In fact, according to a report in CongressDaily the same day the budget was passed, we are seeing more and more hard evidence that billions of dollars have "gone missing." They're not missing between the cushions of sofas; the billions of dollars have been stolen. (Keep in mind my earlier allusion to last cigarettes and blindfolds because this war has been a giant subterfuge for the transfer of billions of dollars from the taxpayers (present and especially future) to the creation of generational wealth for a new and dangerously powerful American aristocracy. The robber barons never came close to pulling of a heist like these guys.

All those batches of missing ten million here and 5 million there add up to a lot of money. And in a time when no one is quibbling about whether or not there is a Bush Recession-- only how long and how deep and if it will turn into a Depression-- the last thing the economy needs is a massive transfer of wealth from the public sector to the hands of the rich and powerful, long the most consistent hallmark of the Bush Regime.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee used a hearing to publicize a Defense Department inspector general's report, released today, which estimates that of $8.2 billion used to buy commercial goods and services in the war, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service processed $7.8 billion in payments without adequate documentation. For $1.4 billion of payments, the Army lacked the minimum justification required for payment, the report estimates. "We don't know what we paid for," testified Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing. The IG made estimates by extrapolating from a sample of 702 commercial payments; a methodology the Army questioned in a written response to the report. Lawmakers highlighted some of the largest single payouts made without adequate paperwork, such as voucher showing an $11.1 million payment in 2005 to contractor IAP Worldwide Services that "was missing both the receiving report and invoice," the report said, and a $5.6 million payment made in 2004 to an Iraqi company without any description of how the money was used.

The report also highlights $135 million in payments made without documentation through the Commander's Emergency Response Program, which was created to give local U.S. military commandeers in Iraq the ability to back small local projects. While the program is generally used to pay Iraqis for supporting U.S. forces, the report notes large lump sum payments of up $8 million made to foreign governments with troops in Iraq. The United Kingdom got $68 million, Poland $45 million and South Korea $21 million. But the IG report says of 22 related vouchers reviewed "none contained sufficient supporting documentation to provide reasonable assurance that these funds were used for their intended purpose." The report says auditors could not identify any reconstruction project resulting from the funds. Ugone denied that war conditions excuse sloppy record keeping. She said auditors used standards significantly less rigorous than those for domestic spending to decide if payments were adequately documented. "There are challenges, but there should be some semblance of accountability," she said. "No documentation, from our perspective, is not acceptable." Ugone noted that from 2003 to 2006, the audit found accounting did not improve.

But it isn't just naked theft from the Iraq morass. The Bush Regime and the Republican Party and Blue Dog enablers have systematically dismantled the entire regulatory structure set up to defend ordinary Americans from powerful and insatiable predators (i.e.- the lobbyists and corporate campaign donors for both political parties). Warren Buffett is pretty rich, maybe the richest man in the world. When endorsing Obama the other day, he sited the dismantling of the regulatory system and the return to an unstable law of the jungle capitalism that is great for the greed-obsessed super-rich and powerful and ruinous for everyone else and for society and the economy as a whole. Yesterday Buffett was in Berlin warning about the impending economic implosion built into the Republican economic policies of the past decade.

"It's not right that hundreds of thousands of jobs are being eliminated, that entire industrial sectors in the real economy are being wiped out by financial bets even though the sectors are actually in good health."

Buffett complained about the lack of effective controls.

"That's the problem," he said. "You can't steer it, you can't regulate it anymore. You can't get the genie back in the bottle."

Nearly 33 million people have watched this video I want you to take a look at-- think about that number for a moment; it's more than the combined population of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Francisco and Columbus, the 15 biggest cities in America. In this clip, the predators are the Republican Party serving the interests of their corporate masters. The equally vicious but ineffective crocodile would be the Blue Dogs and DLC wannabe Republicans. The water buffalo are... us-- ordinary Americans-- and our sometimes political protectors, the Democrats. Now watch:

SUSAN COLLINS DIDN'T DO HER JOB FOR THE PAST 7 YEARS BUT SHE WANTS MAINE TO SEND HER BACK TO THE SENATE

This has been a bad week for Susan Collins. Usually careful to try to mimic Maine's far more popular Olympia Snowe, Collins was the was the only member of the Maine congressional delegation (2 Democrats, 2 Republicans) to stick with Bush and oppose the farm bill-- something that isn't going to endear her to northern Maine's agricultural communities. Even with her practicing her Bush rubber stamp routine-- as one of the 15 senators opposing the bill-- it passed both the House and Senate with veto-proof majorities.

That may hurt her re-election bid a bit, but probably not as much as the steady stream of information tying her to the big gas and oil companies and the catastrophic increases in the cost of heating oil and gasoline (a 145% increase since the Bush-Cheney-Collins Economic Miracle commenced in 2000). The Maine Democratic Party is making the case that Collins has been a pawn of the Big Energy corporations. She's sucked up nearly $300,000 in campaign contributions from Big Energy. And what did they get for their money?

• Susan Collins joined Republicans to kill an amendment that set a national goal to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil by 2025 [Vote 140, 6/16/05]. The bill merely set goals for reducing dependence on foreign oil rather than implementing a hard requirement, yet Susan Collins still voted against the amendment.

• Susan Collins voted twice for the disastrous 2005 Cheney Energy Bill that gave $14 billion to Big Oil during times of record profits [Vote 212, 7/29/05; Vote 213, 7/29/05]. The final version of the bill failed to reduce our nation's dependence on oil or provide relief to consumers, and added billions of dollars in irresponsible subsidies for coal, oil and nuclear power. The League of Conservation Voters called the Energy bill the "most anti-environment bill signed into law in recent memory." [LCV Scorecard 2005, www.lcv.org

• Susan Collins and Senate Republicans voted against an effort to curb the record-making profits of Big Oil while Mainers were struggling to pay for fuel. Susan Collins even opposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies that redirected the funds to struggling American consumers. In 2005, Susan Collins voted against an amendment that would impose a temporary windfall profit tax on crude oil and rebate the tax collected back to the American consumer. [S2020, Vote 331, 11/17/05; Vote 341, 11/17/05]

• Susan Collins rejected efforts to invest in renewable energy technologies. In 2001, Susan Collins and Senate Republicans rejected an amendment to establish tax credits for investments in renewable energy technologies [Vote 125, 5/21/01]. Collins voted against these incentives even as our country must increase our energy efficiency to be less dependent on foreign oil.

• Susan Collins voted for the Energy Bill that did not have conservation Measures for Higher Mileage Vehicles. In July 2005, according to the Portland Press Herald, "But the bill also didn't call for conservation measures such as higher mileage for light trucks such as sport-utility vehicles and minivans. So the only limit on motoring those gas guzzlers onto the open road will be the costliness of the pit stops. ...The Senate voted 74-26, with Snowe and Collins, both Republicans, in favor."  [Portland Press Herald, 7/31/05]

And then there's the little investigative report on WGME, Portland's CBS affiliate. This should be the issue that helps Mainers understand the disastrous results of Collins throwing her lot in with a bad crowd. Take a look:



Blue America has endorsed Rep. Tom Allen, the progressive Democrat running for the Senate seat in November. So far 644 of us have contributed over $15,000 to Tom's campaign. If you'd like to see Barack Obama work with a Senate that won't be obstructing his every move, please consider making a donation to Tom's campaign